Cricket Australia-players’ body in 5-year MoU; dispute over

Cricket Australia and Australian Cricketers Association have executed a five-year memorandum of understanding to bury the long-standing dispute over revenue sharing between the two bodies. The MoU will be applicable to men as well as female players registered with Cricket Australia.

In a sharp contrast to the earlier 20-year-old fixed-revenue model, the cricket players and administrators have now agreed to a more simple and smoothly codified order.

The draft is concluded with two months of negotiations and drafting after CA chief executives James Sutherland and ACA’s Alistair Nicholson had announced an in-principle agreement at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on August 3.

Under the MoU, payment of 27.5 percent of agreed Australian Cricket Revenue will be provided to all players according to CA’s projections over the next five years, with players also receiving 19 percent of revenue created above projections and grassroots levels of the game handed 8.5 percent. In case the revenue exceeds more than A$1.96 billion over the next five years, then the players will get 27.5 percent of that extra surplus.

The players’ union would continue to be funded by the CA. The money, unlike considered a grant to the players body earlier, will be accounted as a payment for the players’ intellectual property as used by the CA for broadcasting, promotion and sponsorship of the game.

“We’re very pleased to be putting this one behind us and we’re looking forward to five years of stability. That [the next one] might be someone else’s problem I think,” Sutherland said. Players, having central contracts and State players without multi-year deals, were left unemployed after the deadline for a new MoU was not brokered by June 30.

ACA had earlier rejected the new pay offer from the game’s governing body, saying the proposal will be a win for cricket administrators but a loss for the game.

In March, CA made an offer, proposing that the average pay of Australia’s international women’s players would rise from A$79,000 to A$179,000, while the average remuneration of State cricketers would be more than doubled to A$52,000.

Under CA’s proposal, only male international players would have had the chance to share in any surplus revenue, while other domestic male players and women at both domestic and international level would have had to settle for fixed amounts which would not have changed according to the game’s income.

However, the ACA had pointed out a series of concerns with the proposal, saying that it “disrespects the value of domestic cricketers and the role they play in Australian cricket”. The major reason behind the ACA ’s opposition was CA’s proposal to scrap a shared revenue model for player payments, which had been in place for nearly 20 years.

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